Entries in Preston Lerner
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As someone who grew up in Dearborn, MI during the “Total Performance” era at Ford, I remember watching snippets of the 24 Hours of Le Mans on ABC’s Wide World of Sports as Ford attempted to topple Ferrari in the mid 1960s. This was an amazing time for the United States. Though the Vietnam war was broadcast to living rooms each night, and racial strife gripped a number of cities, including Detroit, it wasn’t all doom and gloom. The first tentative steps were being made in personal computing and the electronics that supported it, and the space program — despite the tragedy of Apollo 1 — was moving inexorably toward landing own the moon.

Ford’s attempt to defeat Ferrari fit into this narrative, though it was no easy task to complete. Though we speak of the GT40 in reverential tones today, the car was not on the cutting edge of race car design, and it would take four years before the car that started Ford’s win streak at Le Mans would notch a pair of wins of its own against newer machinery. The GT 40 had a steel monocoque when aluminum was already the norm. It was powered by a large, heavy production-based V8 mated to troublesome Colotti gearbox, and weighed more than the competition’s racers. Its greenhouse was massively wide, and its aerodynamics were a shambles. But, boy, was it fast.